The Notebook Habit: Why I Still Write by Hand
Forty years of paper notebooks, and why the slower medium keeps producing the better sentences.
I have never quite trusted a sentence that was born on a screen. It is not superstition. It is simply that a keyboard is too fast for the kind of thinking a first draft requires.
A notebook is slower. The hand cannot keep up with the mind, and that lag is the point. You are forced to choose. You are forced to leave things out. What survives the walk from the head to the page is almost always the sentence worth keeping.
I carry the same brand of notebook I have carried for twenty years. Unlined. Softcover. Small enough for a jacket pocket. It has been in the passenger seat of hire cars from Girona to Málaga, on café tables in Palma, on the arm of a lounger in a hospital corridor at three in the morning.
The notebook is not the book. The notebook is the field the book eventually grows in. Every novel I have written began as fragments — a name, a shutter colour, a scrap of overheard dialogue — that sat in a notebook for months before they knew they belonged together.
Buy a good notebook. Carry it everywhere. Write badly in it. The book will find you when it is ready.
